Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Wednesday August 31, 2011 @11:17AM
from the one-of-us-one-of-us dept.

Fresh from the 2011 GNU Hackers Meeting, Andy Wingo has written a long piece on the status of Guile Scheme, the woefully underutilized official user extension language of GNU. Wingo argues that Guile is the best choice for extension in GNU given the ability of Scheme to adapt to change over time. Presented with using e.g. Javascript instead of Scheme for its popularity: 'We should also consider the costs of using hastily designed languages. JavaScript has some crazy bad stuff, like with, var hoisting, a poor numeric model, dynamic this scoping, lack of modularity regarding binding lookup ... Finally, we have the lifespan issue. If GNU had chosen Tcl because it was popular, we would have a mass of dead code' (it should be noted that Guile does partially support Javascript syntax). With the proliferation of Firefox extensions, Greasemonkey, etc. it is clear there is a large set of power users who want to modify the programs they use without spending years becoming skilled programmers. Perhaps after Emacs has been ported to Guile the philosophy of user extensibility will spread to other parts of the GNU system.

What I don't understand—admittedly, as a non-programmer—is why they don't just say "From now on, Emacs Lisp is the GNU extension language." Or, alternatively, that Guile continues to be the GNU extension language, but that as of Emacs 26 (or whatever version), Emacs Lisp will conform to the Guile specification.

Having both just seems like splitting resources to no good end to me.

It is all part of our (the vim users) evil plans to continue to subvert and destroy emacs. Enjoy your differently-abled extensible languages suckers!